Winning WWII, Greek Fires, and Mall Mobs

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Hello, and thank you for joining the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

Victor is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow in Military History and Classics at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marsha Buskie Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

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and we've been on a

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the history of military battles.

and we are on World War II for you who haven't joined us before and we're on the years from 1942 to the end of the war so we'll be talking about that in the mid-section of this podcast

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So Victor, we've had some incidents this week of fires.

And I wanted to particularly focus, I know that we have the Hawaii fire here in the United States, States, but it seems that Greece, one of your favorite countries in Europe, has had innumerable fires and several of them have come together and they're covering 310 square miles as of yesterday.

And that's the biggest fire that's ever occurred in the EU.

So a lot of the papers are talking about that.

And I went to our favorite left-wing paper, The Guardian, to see what the reason for this is.

And they said that it was the climate crisis that was causing the fires here.

And I was wondering if you, what your reflection was.

Well, my

two-thirds,

two-thirds of

those arrested in conjunction with the fires were arsonist.

So I think they have over 80 arson arrests out of 130 or 40 people they pulled in, whether they were, you know, lax about

campgrounds or they were burning brush.

But anybody who goes there knows that you get these hot winds that come from the Sahara sometimes, and they collide with the normal northern winds down from the Balkans, from northern Europe, and it creates all sorts of turbulence.

It's got the same climate as the San Joaquin Valley of California in the interior, and then it's very close on the coast of Southern California.

And so you know that fires are endemic.

And part of the climate problem that I have is that

they go back 150 years and they say this is the hottest in history, but we don't, I mean, we don't know.

I mean, there's a reason in classical literature that August was called the dog star month, where

the month where your knee, and the lyric poet said, your knees get weak and you can't do anything.

There's a reason why people have a siesta in Portugal and Spain and Italy and Greece, because it's hot and it's very, very dry.

And if you go to Greece, the the biggest problem people have

from ages on is finding water in the interior.

It can be very wet and cool up near Macedonia, but down in the Peloponnese, in Attica, it's very, very dry and it's hard to find a good aquifer.

And so, and it's windy in the summer.

And so these things happen.

And nobody knows why these people set these fires.

I think the minister, the civic minister, called them arson scum.

He was very angry.

But in the fire that almost destroyed my house two years ago, the huge aspen fire, there had never been a fire like that.

Those cabins around Huntington Lake had been there since 1912, and 70 or 80 of them were burned down.

So for over 100 years, they hadn't had anything like that.

So the question is, was it really climate change or was it radical changes in forestry policy that said that you could not clean out the forest and cutbacks and fire prevention and basically the destruction of the timber industry?

And I think that had a lot to do with it.

And I don't know all of the multitude of factors that played into these terrible forest fires, but in Hawaii, there were these 19th century plantations that had gone, had cleared the land and they'd gone out of production.

And they had these tall, dry grasses, and they were up above the city, and they were very flammable.

So it was like putting a torch to a bellows.

So the wind came down and just blew down right down the hill.

So I'm not saying that climate change doesn't have an effect, but in all of these instances, there's a human agency.

And

the people who believe that climate change rules all, governs all,

is all

omnipotent,

the people who believe that, then they suffer from the consequences of that ideology.

Because if that's true, then

they're culpable because part of that ideology is to let forests burn and to let grasses grow and not to make logging roads into these areas that are traditionally tinderboxes.

So you see what I'm saying?

It's a catch-22.

They're saying, we don't want you to cut any timber.

We don't want you to go into thin out the forest.

We don't want you to take out dead trees.

We don't want cattle grazing to get the grass away.

We don't want individuals to go up there and cut firewood and clean the forest out because we don't like fireplaces.

And then when the forest goes up, it's climate change.

But maybe if they would allow reasonable cutting and restore the forest industries and allow ranchers to keep the grass down and maybe allow people on the weekends to go up and get firewood, then these places wouldn't be so combustible.

But you can't reason.

And so it's just climate change, climate change, it rules all, it explains all, and anybody who is skeptical is considered some type of heretic.

But Greece is a tinderbox.

It always was when I lived there two and a half years, and I think I've been there at least in the last 50.

I was first there 50 years ago.

And I can tell you when I arrived, there was a forest fire.

And I can remember smelling it in Athens.

And I can remember floods.

I can remember earthquakes.

That's what Greece is.

It's like California.

So it's, I don't think it's a novel experience.

It's a tragic experience.

The Greeks are actually pretty good with their fire protection once they get going.

They've been getting better.

I think they're better than the California is.

They've brought in a lot of countries from the EU to help them fight these fires.

And to your point about the short term in which they have

studied these things that said the Guardian article had to confess that it was the largest in EU history, but EU history amounted to 2,000 to the present.

So.

Well, I mean, there you go.

In the case of California, it's about 1865 to 1885.

And so now then they use something called computer projections.

based on mathematical simulations, but we don't have any idea what the climate was prior in California or much of an idea to 1865.

Maybe in the 1850s by anecdote.

But there have been periods throughout history of very cold temperatures and very hot temperatures.

But

climate change is tied up with a larger

ideology or religion that industrialization and modern

comfortable lifestyles are somehow evil

And they represent the decadence of the bourgeoisie class.

It's a consumer, it's consumer-addicted.

They lack the romance of the poor, and they lack the taste of the rich, the cultivation.

And so people don't like those middle-class people.

They don't like their ram pickups.

They don't like their jet skis.

They don't like their Winnebagos.

They don't like their barbecue grills.

And they find an ideology then to plug into that dislike.

And it's a deductive process.

It really is.

Because if it wasn't, then

if it wasn't deductive, then they would say, okay,

we're going after ceiling fans, but let's just outlaw private jets.

Do you really believe the world would fall apart?

Did it fall apart really in 1960, in the 50s, when most corporations didn't have private jets?

and much less celebrities.

So

why don't they go after private jets?

Their carpet footprint is huge.

And why go after the middle-class ceiling fans?

See, it just doesn't compute.

And it's

when you have arsonists, so if I understand the news reports coming out of Greece, if you didn't have 80 arsonists setting fires, there wouldn't have been 300 square miles and then it wouldn't have been

caused by climate change.

So when an arsonist sets a fire, then it's climate change because it actually ignites and takes off.

That doesn't make any sense.

No.

But why do you think these fires?

Because clearly, no other European country has all of you know, so many fires being set in them.

Why in Greece?

I've read every single, I kind of read the Greek newspaper.

There's every single exegesis.

There's terrorists.

There's climate activists that want to draw attention to global warming.

There are mentally ill people.

They're the criminally minded that like killing people.

They're the sloppy people who don't know anything about the outdoors or the wilderness.

They just go out there, they light a fire, they camp, and bam.

You hear every, there's shepherds or people who are farmers who are collecting brush and they don't understand the direction of the wind.

You hear that as well.

I did that for 30 30 years as burn brush piles.

I have something in California called Burn Days.

And a member of my family, I won't mention the person, was burning 15 acres of uprooted trees and the piles were about 40 feet high.

And he lit the pile and it burned down pretty reasonably.

And it was at least,

I don't know, 600 yards away, maybe a quarter mile away from a house.

But then when he left and the coal started to,

you know, they were pretty much down to about two or three feet of this huge pile, but it was red hot.

A wind came up from the north and it blew embers to the neighbor's house and burned it down.

Oh my God.

Right next to my house.

And we had another incidence when we were burning on a burn date old wooden trays that they used to use to dry raisins.

And a member of my family lit them.

It was perfectly legal.

There was

ample distance.

And the next thing we knew,

a wind came up, and this fire licked in to all the high-power electrical wires to the farm and just scorched them, crackling everything, just burned them.

And so

that's what happens with people.

They get careless or they don't understand fire.

Fire is really unpredictable.

You don't know, have any idea.

When I was watching the Aspen fire, they would give you a detailed map of the wind, the direction of the wind, the speed of the fire, and then its anticipated computerized route.

And I can remember for the 20 days,

wherever I was in the United States, I looked at that all day long on my cell phone.

And you could see the direction was going right toward my house.

And then, in fact, they had an area, a peripheral beyond the actual flames where they suggested that the heat would start fire spontaneously.

And my house was inside that area and,

you know, it was gone.

And then all of a sudden, it wasn't.

The winds changed.

They died down.

Some old hands that knew how to use bulldozers to...

put dirt and went they charged right into the fire and made a huge berm and it stopped about an eighth of a mile.

But it's very unpredictable.

And

I don't,

it's not a good way of thinking.

It's not the scientific method to be deductive and say climate change is indisputable and everything

follows from that.

postulation.

Yeah, it does.

And it doesn't make any sense.

No.

But, you know, now that you're talking the fire in Hawaii, it seems like a lot of the news is blaming the incompetence of civil authorities.

That's another theme.

It's just another theme.

And if you're trying to suggest, Sammy, that it seems like the director of water resources or civic

civic emergencies

or

the wildlife

rangers, the top administration that's politically appointed, it seems like they weren't appointed on the basis of meritocracy, but because they were either political hacks or because they fit some pre-existing race, class, gender formula.

But that's something we've, I don't want to beat that horse to death because we've, all of our listeners know that when you have a Comissar system and you're not using criteria based on expertise or past

demonstrable excellence, but you're using other criteria that's deductive.

We're going to start with saying we need a,

what's better example is Kamala Harris.

When you deductively say, I want a black woman without thinking who are the black women in the employment pool, then you get Kamala Harris.

And there were some really incompetents in Hawaii.

You know, it was.

I don't know.

This is a larger question that everybody that's listening has to ponder because there's some value of diversity that if you have a multiracial society, you can't have large numbers or disproportionate numbers of people that don't have access to income or they're poor.

But there's a fine line that if you start to appoint people that don't have the expertise, then the entire society loses, including themselves.

And so

that is something that is a taboo subject in California because of all the malaise in California.

When people say,

well,

you pay 13.2 taxes, you pay the highest gas taxes, you pay among the highest sales taxes, your property assessments are so high, even if your rate's low, you end up paying the highest property taxes.

You have the highest electricity bills.

You have the highest energy bills.

You have the highest gas prices at the pump.

And then you get the worst schools, not quite the worst, fifth from the bottom, 49th in highway ratings by Forbes magazine, et cetera, et cetera.

One-third of all welfare recipients, 22% of the population below the poverty line.

When you have all that,

why?

And part of the reason is that you have lost about 10 million people that had real expertise.

And they felt if I'm going to pay that exorbitant rate, I want something in return as far as services from the government.

And I'm not getting that, so I'm leaving.

And then we started to hire from people for the sake of diversity that did not have the education or expertise as the people who left.

And you can see it.

Go to the DMV.

And it's just a mess.

It's chaos.

And the same is true of California balloting.

When you have a congressional election, nobody believes that on election day

in

any type of purple congressional district, and we have about, I don't know, 15 of them.

Nobody believes the count will be really known for three or four weeks.

It's just that's what happens when you're not applying meritocratic standards to everybody.

And it's funny because the civil service system was designed to prevent tribalism, not racial tribalism, but tribalism of familial tribes, that you didn't just hire your cousin and his brother and your son-in-law on the police force.

And so you have to take a

civil service exam.

And it's sort of part of the civic process of reform.

And now we've just destroyed that reform because instead of hiring your uncle or hiring your best friend or hiring somebody that's incompetent because he's related to you, you hire on the basis of gender and race.

Sometimes they can be good appointments, but it's not going to be guaranteed they're going to be good appointments.

And so the aggregate might be a problem, right?

And in the aggregate, all of these hires hires, you're going to get enough bad appointments that

it's going to be destructive to your civilization.

It is.

I don't want to be too critical.

I try to be upbeat because I know that people get tired of that everything's going to hell.

But

ultimately, people suffer.

When I was at Cal State University and I was trying to build a classics program, I really tried to prepare a lot and read scholarship so that lectures on, I don't know, epic literature or

medieval literature or the Persian Wars, what caused the Roman Empire to implode.

They were full of facts and scholarship.

And I tried to have a rigorous class.

But when you would look at people that were teaching at that place and they had been hired on the basis of criteria other than the quality of their dissertation or the quality of their scholarship, it was sad because the students were suffering.

Students were getting a mediocre education.

And all they were doing is listening to rants, rants, rants, rants, by people who were untouchable.

And at some point,

there's going to be cosmic ramifications, and you can see it.

So when you have, we rank among the bottom of the industrial language.

In languages and math, we rank among the lowest of the major industrial countries.

The United States does, on test scores and achievement scores.

And yet in California, we're watering down the math requirement because we find that it discriminates, doesn't discriminate.

It just means that people who can't do the work are inordinately or disproportionately of one particular race, and therefore it must be endemic racism or discrimination.

Yeah.

So we've already crossed that Rubicon when brilliant people like Shelby Steele and Tom Sowell, Robert Woodson warned everybody

as we came out of the Martin Luther King era, stop right now.

We have a quality of opportunity.

Let black leaders and the black community go back to their garrison mentality in the 50s when there was endemic racism and the black family

held together under great oppression and there was a community network and people actually, as Tom Soule has shown, in many areas of achievement, blacks were either at the medium or above.

But do not, they warned us, do not allow

this

increasing insidious white guilt

to fool you into lowering your own standards to take advantage of something that's given to you out of guilt.

And

those were just voices in the wilderness.

People mocked them or criticized them, but they were absolutely right.

Yeah,

well, Victor, let's do one more topic before we move on to World War II, and that is we just recently saw some more of smash and grab, but this time at the Del Almo Fashion Center in Torrance, there were over a thousand, and they had to call in a bunch of neighboring police departments to stop this.

And I was wondering what your thoughts were on this.

Well,

I know, I know, Torrance is actually a pretty,

when I teach at Pepperdine on occasion and I ride my bike over there, it's actually a very close-knit, safe community.

And they have a very impressive mall.

And so the idea that a thousand people, and I looked at as many clips as I could,

and I would say they were preponderantly African-American young people.

Okay, maybe there were free movies that day, as was alleged.

Who knows?

But it seemed organized.

And they were attacking attacking security guards, and they were attacking people of a different race other than themselves, and they were breaking numerous laws.

And there was nothing anybody could do about it.

And the same thing, to a lesser extent, was true of Emeryville, and it's going to continue.

And this was an outgrowth of the George Floyd

phenomenon, where we were going to recalibrate race, we were going to stop incarceration that was preponderantly falling on black youth.

We were going to decriminalize the

jurisprudence.

So $950 of theft was really de facto not really a crime at all.

It wouldn't be really enforced.

We were going to have inordinate number,

inordinate in the sense of disproportionate number of African Americans in commercials, in Hollywood roles, not 12%

as was the old goal that every group would be proportionally represented, but we're going to have repertory representation.

And we've done all that.

It's been radical.

Everybody's remarked about it, but it's had zero effect on crime or murders in Chicago or smash and grab or carjacking.

And then the question is begged, why?

Why?

Why no effect?

And the answer is human nature.

If somebody believes that you feel guilty and you're giving something to them or you're giving them an exemption, then they wouldn't do that exemption unless you were oppressed and they were an oppressor.

So if that were be true, you can up the ante and increase your behavior because they're going to continue not to do anything because obviously they have a problem.

You don't have a problem.

If they're going to give an opportunity to, you're going to take it.

That's the mentality that's operative.

And I don't know how you stop it.

Yeah, I don't know how you stop it either.

I know how you stop it.

I know how you stop stop it not what they did they said the newspapers are saying and no juvenile was arrested and they they always use the word juvenile

they never use the word juvenile and yet if some crazed guy in jacksonville florida kills three blacks and he's an utter racist and kills himself then we have joe biden down demagoguing that this is proof of white supremacy but when you have and there were a lot of clips of african-american young men attacking teenage whites

on those Torrance clips.

But that doesn't count because the person didn't express itly say that I'm doing this out of a racial motivation, but it was obvious that it was.

They picked those people out.

And I don't know what the

what I'm worried about is the cumulative result of all of this when people watch this.

And maybe they're not watching it because CNN and MSNBC or NBC doesn't show it.

But it does get out on the internet.

And the cumulative effect is when people see disproportionately black youth doing this,

and then they juxtapose that with a litany or an insidious racism, racism, racism, they don't equate.

They can't square that circle.

And

you see what I mean?

Yeah, I do see what you mean.

You want to answer for that.

No, you want to say to the people who are alleging racism, do you really believe that whites are forcing black people, young black males

with females, to go into torrents and steal and destroy and riot?

You think that they did that?

Why did they do that?

Is it a frustration?

Let us know.

And does it have anything to do with the fact that about 84% of children born in the black community have no father who's around?

And the fact that you say that, is that racist?

Because it's none of non-black America's business.

But it is their business when that infringes upon everybody.

They can't go to a mall or will be attacked.

And then when you juxtapose that, as I said, with this demand for reparations or wokeness or,

you know, diversity, equity, and inclusion,

it gets very strange.

It really does.

It's almost like the elite,

the elite, the the upper, upper middle class African-American person and the elite, elite white person, they have this little relationship with each other.

And it's based on the idea that if they don't do that, if they don't produce, you know, they don't produce an anchor who's African-American and at $4 million, if Don Lamon doesn't get promoted, then people are going to riot in torrents.

Is that the idea?

He has no connection connection with them at all.

And Oprah has no connection with them.

So the people that are loudest, Whoopi Goldberg has no connection with them.

But they think they do.

They think they do because

ultimately that's racist to say that you have connection.

I don't have any connection whatsoever

with 99% of the academics in major universities today that are white.

When I see them, I don't go over there and give them a high five.

Why would I do that?

You know what I'm saying?

The closest people, my closest friends at the Hoover Institution were black, and I didn't even notice they were black.

But

is that what they want?

Is that what these activists want?

Do they want us all to re-tribalize?

As I said before, it's like nuclear proliferation.

Once one tribe starts to go tribal, then everybody will go tribal for their own protection if everybody sees each other only in tribal or racial essential terms.

So it's like a nuke.

If that country's got a nuke, then we've got to have one.

If those people are being tribal, then we're going to be tribal to protect ourselves.

It's like gang, the mentality of gang.

It's pre-civilizational.

It's the first book of Thucydides where he says before the polis,

people were nomadic and they were tribal.

and then they were settled and then they created a political organization that transcended their superficial appearance and that was the beginning of civilization yeah this is all retro civilization it really is yeah

well victor we better go for a break and then come back and start talking about world war ii stay with us and we'll be back this is the victor davis hansen show

welcome back um victor so so

we made it all the way through

1942 when the war started turning, but I think we hadn't quite talked about the turning of the war.

I was looking at your book, The Second World Wars, that is a large compendium of history about World War II, and I found this interesting

assessment that you made.

You wrote, the Axis powers had

surmised that the poor fighting ability of Allied military forces and the inexperience of their leaders would nullify the indisputable power of their factories.

How strange then that they lost the war because their own enfeebled industries and blinkered masters and commanders nullified the spirit and

competence of their fighting men.

And I was wondering if we could start there.

Well, there was a turning point.

Everybody, we ended last time basically with the idea that the Axis were in a race.

And it looked like in the summer of 1942

that they were winning.

Hitler had not lost a battle till really till Stalingrad.

And the Japanese had not lost a battle till the Battle of Coral Sea in May.

But more importantly, even after Coral Sea and even after Midway, if you look at the naval battles in the fall of 1942 around

Guadalcanal and the Bismarck Sea, the Japanese did pretty well.

They sank the Wasp, they sank the Hornet,

torpedoed the Saratoga.

At one point, in fall of 1942, there was only one carrier in the Pacific that was operatable, the Enterprise.

Now, there were 25 Essex carriers, all better than any carrier in the world, soon to be completed.

Thanks to the Southerner Carl Vinson and the three Carl Vinson's naval construction acts in the 1930s, where they basically planned to build an enormous fleet, and they accelerated that process when it looked like they were going to go to war.

But as I said, the Nazis had gone up to the top of the Caucas Mountains and

they were barreling.

Army Group South in 1942, Case Blue was going right into the Caspian Sea to cut all the oil.

25 million barrels a day they were going to cut cut to the Soviet Union and expropriate it.

And they did destroy 90% of Stalingrad.

Looked like they had won Stalingrad by, say, September, October.

And so, when you look at the entire picture, the logic of the Axis was: yes,

now that we,

because of the stupidity of the Japanese militarist and Hitler, they think of what they did.

They ran wild, the Axis did from Jan from September 1st, 1939 to June 22nd, 1941.

Hitler won nine wars.

Norway, Belgium, Luxembourg, Netherlands, France, the Balkans, Yugoslavia, Greece, Ukraine,

and ran wild in North Africa.

And the Japanese completely expropriated the British Empire and the Pacific and the Dutch Empire and the French Empire and almost the American.

They took the Philippines.

And all we had, they took Wake Island.

All we had was Pearl Harbor, and it was destroyed.

Could have been really destroyed had they hit the dock works and the oil tanks on December 7th.

But then they did two stupid things.

They invaded the Soviet Union and they attacked Pearl Harbor.

And at that point,

when you look at the economy of the Soviet Union and the British Empire, not just Britain, the Empire, Australia, Canada, South Africa, India, and its wherewithal, and you look at the production and ships capacity, then

they were in big trouble.

And so they had to count on quickly finishing the war and knocking out inexperienced Allied soldiers that had appeased the Axis during the 1930s.

And it was based on the premise that we are martial nations.

We have a credo of military excellence.

We have better commanders.

And they're going to throw four times the manpower.

The Allies had four times, about 50 million people they could employ in less versus about 12.

And they had about 10 times the economy.

But in Hitler's mind, we have Gudarian, and we have von Rundstedt, and we have von Klug,

and we have Model, and we've got all these brilliant Rommel, and the Japanese have Yamamoto, and they've got the Zero, and we've got the BF-109, and they were ahead.

But they terribly miscalculated because, number one,

the Allies didn't act as if they were in the 1930s appeasing.

Once they invaded Russia and once they attacked the United States, they went into full military production.

By 1943,

75%

of U.S.

GDP was

devoted to the war.

Hitler wasn't even close at that point.

German women could still buy nylons when Americans could not.

They completely revamped the American economy, and it was just enormous.

And they turned it over to Walter Knudsen and Robert Knudsen and GM and Henry Ford and Henry Kaiser, and they said, go to it.

And it was just astonishing.

The second thing they didn't realize about was that the Army War College in the 30s, the U.S.

was demilitarized, but it had the infrastructure, the skeleton at the academies and the postgraduate war colleges to turn out really great people.

So you had organizers and administrators like MacArthur and Nimitz and Eisenhower, and then you had brilliant people at every level.

Whether it was Curtis O'May or Hap Arnold or Jimmy Doolittle

or George Patton or Lightning Joe Collins or you name it.

At every level, there were very good commanders and the British did too.

They really did.

They had General Slim.

He was excellent.

And for all the criticism of Monty, he wasn't too bad.

And Alexander was like Eisenhower.

He was very competent.

And then when you look at the actual fighting men,

The Americans were green and they were wiped out at the Kaiserine Pass in North Africa, basically, but they lost about a thousand.

It wasn't anywhere near Stalingrad, but they learned very quickly.

And the second thing that was unknown, so

were they going to win the race, the Axis, and

to out-produce the Allies before their economies kicked in?

No.

Were they so much superior in terms of fighting spirit, fighting ability, and command that they could nullify the Axis, the Allies' advantage?

No.

So then what were the criteria that was left?

Would they coordinate with each other?

That would be, would Italy and Germany and Japan have a united central command?

And the answer is you'd think they would.

They're all fascist, right?

When you look at the other big three,

you have a British parliamentary

monarchy, you have a radical American constitutional republic dash democracy, and you've got communism.

And you've got Roosevelt angry at the British Empire and Churchill warning him not to trust the mass murdering Stalin.

And Stalin thinks the Americans are a bunch of cowboys and the British are condescending.

You don't think they would work.

And what happened?

They worked wonderfully,

wonderfully.

So the Soviets, as we said last time, concentrated on heavy industry, artillery, and tanks.

They made the best tank in the world, T-34.

A

American engineer, Christie, offered a chassis and a design that nobody wanted.

He went over to the Soviet Union in the 30s.

They took it.

It was the only major tank that had diesel fuel.

It had a high-powered 76-millimeter gun.

It had sloped armor.

It was the best tank in the world between 1942 and 1944.

And

they were very well led with Zhukov and others and Koniev.

And they stopped the German army.

They killed three out of four German soldiers in World War II.

And Stalin kept saying, we need a second front.

And the Americans stupidly wanted to go into Europe.

But in this turning point in 1943, they did invade North Africa.

And they swept out the German army.

So by June of 1943, they were gone.

They had completely, they lost more, they surrendered more people in North Africa in the summer of 1943 than they did in Stalingrad.

People forget that.

And more importantly, American engineers were far superior to German engineers in this sense.

There was no central planning under Hitler, no practicalities.

Nobody in Berlin said, Mein Fuhrer, the key to defeating Britain.

in a blitz is how many marks does it cost to drop a pound or kilogram of incendiary on London?

But instead it was, oh, we're going to have revenge weapons, V1s and V2s.

And people were saying, no, look at the Americans, look at the Lancaster, the British, look at the B-17, the B-24.

Yes, they're losing a lot of people, but in terms of getting...

bombs on the target,

they have so much more tonnage than we do.

We do not have a single operative four-engine bomber.

So what goods are all these rockets?

They're so expensive to build, and they give you very little payload in exchange.

They're terror weapons.

They're not strategic weapons.

They're not designed to pinpoint industries.

They're just to start fires and scare people, and they couldn't even do that.

And then when you look at tank production, yes, the Mark IV was impressive.

Yes, the Panther and the Tiger were terrifying, but how many did they make?

1,600 tigers?

And how many hours did it take to take out a Panther transmission versus Sherman?

We mean 50,000 Shermans.

And believe me, most Sherman never saw a Panther or a tiger.

There was, you know, a 10 to 1.

But they did see a lot of Germans, and they slaughtered a lot of Germans that didn't have armored support.

And then we coordinated.

So we had a front in the West through bombing, and that took a lot of pressure off the Soviets.

What do I mean by that?

So the Soviets were really hurting because the best anti-tank weapon in the war was an millimeter gun.

And Hitler had 10,000 of them on the Eastern Front, and the Germans were absolutely had wonderful optics.

They were blowing up T-34s at great distances.

And once we started bombing Hamburg, and then we went into Berlin, and we went into Cologne, and we started seriously damaging by mid to late 43, losing a lot because we didn't have fighter escort yet.

They started to bring back what?

88 millimeter anti-tank guns to use them to shoot straight up as 30,000 feet, five miles, they would shoot up and maybe

knock down B-17s.

And the result was the Soviet Union really accelerated their westward push.

So we coordinated.

And when

We had a beautifully designed aerodynamic P-51, but with an under-performing Allison engine, what did the British do?

They said, we'd like this plane of yours.

It might even be better designed than our

Supermarine Spitfire.

We'll give you the latest Merlin engine and put it in there.

And what did they end up with?

The best fire of World War II, the P-51.

They could outperform the Fockworth 190.

The same thing with tanks.

They said, you've got a very practical tank.

It's much more practical than ours.

You're Sherman.

Ours are clunky and they're unreliable, but we have a much better gun than you do, so-called 17-pounder.

And if we get rid of your little short-barrel 75 or your long-barrel 76,

we can knock out tigers at a great distance.

And they put this huge cannon or gun into a Sherman and called them fireflies.

Those are just two examples.

There's hundreds of them,

how they operated together, the British, the Soviets, and the Americans.

Now, they weren't going to get along necessarily after the war, but it's ironic because when Hitler went in to the Soviet Union,

he didn't even tell Mussolini.

When Mussolini went into Greece and Albania, when he invaded Greece, he didn't tell Hitler.

And that really

was a distraction.

Hitler had to deal with Yugoslavia and Greece because Mussolini had stirred it up, and he claimed he lost a month from late May to late June.

And the Japanese, when they bombed Pearl Harbor, Hitler asked, where's Pearl Harbor?

He had no idea.

And he had signed a non-aggression pact,

the Ribbentrop, the Molotov-Ribbent Pact,

Ribbentrop Pact of August 23rd, 1939, at the same time the Japanese were fighting the Russians.

And the Japanese said, wait, wait a minute, we have a pact of steel.

We are allies.

And these damn Russians are pulling everybody.

out of the Eastern European borders and they're sending them against us because you signed this peace deal.

And then the Japanese said, oh, we're going to get even with you.

So in April of 1941, right before the invasion of Soviet, what did the Japanese do?

They signed a non-aggression pact with a country that Hitler was going to attack.

And so Japan never invaded the Soviet Union from the east.

And maybe that would have stopped the 250,000 reinforcements that saved Moscow from the final German assaults.

They got to the first subway station.

They claimed they could see the spires of the Kremlin, and that was as far as they got.

But see, they never coordinated.

They were so, fascism was intrinsically suspicious and based on lawlessness.

And so when you have these fascist powers, they couldn't get along and they didn't trust each other and they didn't coordinate.

And at least we had two of three countries that were lawful and transparent, the British and the American.

And they dealt together with Stalin, Stalin, who was lawless.

So what I'm getting at is

envision World War II as these countries that had been arming and had absorbed enormous amounts of natural resources and population.

In the case of the Japanese, they had taken

large swaths of China, Burma, Malaysia, Singapore, the Philippines, the Dutch East Indies, the Shell oil fields.

And in the the case of Hitler, he had taken what is apparently now the entire EU.

And they were sitting pretty when the war then could have ended.

And they didn't end it.

The Japanese had to bomb Pearl Harbor.

They didn't need the Philippines.

They could have sidestepped around it.

And they had all of the European colonies.

And once they did that, and once Hitler went in the Soviet Union, then the war was a race.

And they lost it somewhere around the end of 1943.

After 1943, if you start to look at the key indicators, were submarines still sinking that number of tonnage necessary to starve Britain?

No.

In fact, they were losing submarines at a loss that was not sustainable.

They lost 75% of their submarines.

They lost over 45,000 German submariners.

We were building destroyer escorts and destroyers and escort carriers.

And the convoys were were almost in.

The British had sonar, and they had tapped the ultra machines that tapped the routes of the Wolfbacks.

And the convoy system was mastered.

So that war was lost.

And then about the same time, as we went into 1944, we started to understand you could put a drop tank on a P-47 and later a P-51 and later even a Spitfire.

And suddenly the Americans were going into

eastern Germany with fighter escort.

And these pilots were 19, 20 year old kids that loved hopped-up planes.

And they were under the command of Jimmy Doolittle, who loved kids that loved hopped-up planes.

And he came up with some brilliant ideas.

You don't have to escort the B-17s.

That's crazy.

Why would you just get in the way of a Fokkwolf diving down at 30,000 feet at 400 miles an hour?

That does not work.

You guys go out and just shoot stuff.

So you get a pack of P-51s, you go to a German airfield, strafe it, and then circle around.

If they have a

late model

jet, then you just sit around and wait till the jet takes off and shoot it right before it speeds up, and then wait till it lands and shoot up rail car.

Just do all of that to destroy their airfields and their supplies.

And that's what they did.

And

when you hit the oil fields and you didn't have enough fuel to train the German pilots, so they were not very good after 44.

And suddenly you look at the graph of American crews that were lost and British crews, it just drops precipitously at the end of 1944.

It became one of the most,

the worst place to be in World War II was in a B-17 in late 1942, early 43.

One of the safest places to be was in a B-17 in December or January 1944, 45.

And that was because of the American and British cooperation on how to mount multi-plane bombing raids.

And

the Germans just and the Japanese just had one out.

Can we make no mistakes?

Can we coordinate?

And can we overcome, therefore,

their superior economies and

technological resources and universities?

And they couldn't do it.

And then when you look at supreme leadership,

was Hitler and Tojo and Mussolini, were they more adroit, far-seeing, skillful leaders than Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin?

The answer is no.

Stalin was much more astute than Hitler was, at least in World War II.

He was much more ruthless even.

Churchill,

I don't have to go there about Churchill and Roosevelt compared to Tojo and Mussolini.

Not even close.

And the general staffs are not even close.

And when you get down to the individual soldier, you could make the argument that the first Marine Division that went into Guadalcanal

and

the other six Marine Divisions that followed into Pelelu and Iwo Jima and Okinawa, you can argue about the wisdom of those invasions.

But when they met hardened Japanese troops from years of fighting, they were better.

They were the toughest people in the world by 1945.

The Japanese troops or the Americans?

No, the Americans.

Americans.

They were absolutely skillful.

They had a horrible mission ahead of them.

If you go into Okinawa, how do you get rid of 200,000

Japanese and Okinawan soldiers who have been waiting for you for a year?

And they're three layers deep, three floors deep in coral and reinforced rebar cement with machine guns everywhere.

And they have the high ground.

And yet the Marines just went in and blasted them.

And from april 1st of 1945 to june 15th they slaughtered them and they destroyed the kamikaze fleet they lost 37

37 ships were sunk 5 000 american sailors were killed 7 000 marines were killed on okinawa another 7 000 on iwo earlier it didn't stop them no when you look at those divisions that started, you know, band of other divisions, the 101st Airborne, the 82nd, the 1st Armor Division.

They came out of nowhere.

And by 1945, at the Battle of the Bulge, they were really good.

And they didn't have the equipment of the Germans.

They didn't have as good artillery initially, and they didn't have as good tanks, but they were just, and

they were very good with M1 rifles,

proximity fuses.

coordinated artillery fire and very good commanders.

And had they listened to even the best commanders, they would have won the bulge very quickly.

If they had listened to George Patton to cut the bulge off at its base, they would have entrapped a quarter million soldiers and ended the war.

But instead,

they pushed the bulge from the nose backward, and they lost more people after Bastone than before.

I think it was a catastrophic mistake on the part of Bradley and Eisenhower and Montgomery.

Do you think that the Allied soldiers in the West, not the Japanese

versus the Japanese, but the Allied soldiers were

much worse than the Axis soldiers.

If you're just looking soldier to soldier, not their arms or anything.

They might have been at the beginning.

No, they were.

Put it this way,

in World War I, the French and the British had lost more per...

than the Germans did.

And they were traumatized by Passchendae and the Somme and stormtroopers and what happened at Verdun.

They never wanted to go through that again.

Hitler had

brainwashed the German people by saying that we didn't lose.

We were on the way to victory.

It was not true, but

they did surrender in Belgium and France.

And so the Germans wanted to replay that.

And that was evident throughout the 1930s.

And they came out of the depression much better than the American.

It was Keynesian economics.

It was much better than

what we did by having government control.

I mean, they did have government, but they spurred productive capacities rather than redistributive.

And

they had massive construction projects, and they rearmed, and they weathered the economy.

And that was why in the salons of London and New York, you had all these wealthy elite Westerners bragging about Mussolini was a genius and Hitler was a genius because they had done much better by 1936 or 7 than we had.

And they had a new man and they were not decadent.

We had all that crap.

But no, you could argue by 1944, when you look at the British Army at El Alamein, it was very professionally led.

And

you can argue the Bridge Too Far, the Arnheim campaign, Market Garden was Montgomery's great disaster.

That was not the British soldiers' fault.

The way they fought at Arnheim was just incredible.

And the way they fought on D-Day was incredible.

And the way they fought under Slim in Burma was incredible.

And as I said, the Americans, if you want to look at it, the Americans landed.

They didn't start with a base, the Americans and the British.

They had to land in France.

The Soviet Union started basically where Moscow was

and Sevastopol and

Weningrad.

And that's about a thousand miles to Berlin.

It's about equal distance.

And they left in June, and they got almost, they could have gone to Berlin first, but they got to the demarcation point in nine months.

It took Stalin four years.

Four years.

They had to fight 41, 42, 43, 44, and 45.

And

that's a pretty incredible achievement to land on the beach and have to bring in all of your supplies and fight in foreign countries that are not your own

allied french and belgiums and

dutch and german and then go all the same distance all the way to the heart of germany in less than a year when it took stalin four years

and before somebody says yes victor but they were fighting against but no they weren't there were true divisions like Das Reich or Hermann Göring or and they were good divisions that they faced.

And they had the same problem up going up to Italy.

Nobody in their right mind would ever go up the Italian spine.

If you want to go invade Italy, you do what Hannibal did.

You go from the north down.

You don't land in Sicily and then work your way up with one army on one side of the Apennines and one on the other.

It's just impossible.

So they had the Siegfried, the Gothic line, and it was a bloodbath.

And we never even got into Austria.

Had they listened to some planners who said,

why would you go to Sicily when you can go to Corsica,

you know, and go cut through to Italy at a very, very northern, much more northern latitude and trap the Germans to the south.

And that would have been, that would have been a lot smarter.

But, you know,

that's what's ironic at World War II, the forte of the Japanese

and the Germans, to a lesser extent the Italians, that they were fierce.

there was no holes barred,

they would commit atrocities, they were scary, they had great weapons, and these flabby democracies and bankrupt communism could not match them man for man.

It's not true.

That was just a failure.

And we beat them in every aspect.

We beat them at sea, we beat them in the air, we beat them on the ground.

And the Americans, if you think about it, they started the war with the second largest fleet,

and they ended the war with a fleet that was larger than the British fleet, the Russian fleet, what was left of the German fleet, and the Japanese fleet combined, combined.

And the same was true of their economy.

They had a larger economy than all the belligerents combined.

They supplied 95% of the aviation fuel and about 60% of all the oil that was consumed.

It was just an amazing, amazing.

I mean, nobody thought they could do it.

Nobody really believed you were going to get a guy out of Bakersfield, Dayton, Ohio, Lansing, Michigan, pull him out of high school and send him all the way over to the Pacific or fight, you know, Gwadarians,

panzers.

Nobody thought you could do that.

And they did it.

They did it in three years.

They did it.

So it was pretty incredible.

And maybe next time we can talk about as they started to win, in 43, they had the Casablanca conference that insisted on unconditional surrender.

In other words, the British,

Stalin didn't really know what the British and the Americans do, but they were not going to do what they did in World War I with an armistice.

They were going to force Hitler.

and the Japanese and the Italians to surrender utterly with no conditions.

And then they were going to go in and occupy that country and reform it according to their values, which would be a constitutional system.

And that was going to be the end of Japan bullying Asia and the end of Prussianism for the third time, the third and last time would go across other people's borders.

That was a pretty confident thing to do in 1943 when they were still losing a lot of soldiers.

Remember that when the Allies went on the offensive, if you're going to wage a war for unconditional surrender, then you're giving an enormous propaganda advantage to the enemy because the fascist leader is going to say, look,

you may not like me.

I may have started this war.

I may be incompetent, but they're going to, you can't get out.

Either win or they're going to destroy us because they're saying no negotiations.

Nothing but surrender and be at their mercy.

And that's what Hitler, he kept saying, you know, total war, total war.

That was the big propaganda.

We're in total war now.

But

it was, it was pretty amazing that they achieved that unconditional surrender and they produced things that,

I mean, Americans really didn't really have, they had an army when the war broke out in 1939 that was smaller than Portugal's 19th in the world.

And

they had decrepit planes.

They had some good ships, but not enough of them.

But by 1944, they were fielding B-24s and B-17s that were the best four-engine bombers and B-29s that were space age bomber.

Nobody had ever conceived of anything like it.

They were producing a very good weapon with the M1.

The Sherman tank, the later models, were very good.

Nobody had anything like a Jeep.

They had the Essex Carrier.

They had the best heavy cruisers.

They had this new Iowa class of battleships that were just unheard of.

I mean, they were better than the Yamamoto, the Yamoto, or the Mushasi or the Bismarck by far, the Missouri or the Iowa.

And

they invented landing craft.

They had superior radar and sonar, the Allies.

They had the Mosquito, the British did, and the...

latest model Spitfire that kept getting better and better than the Fockewuff and the Bf-109.

So

they just beat them in every conceivable aspect of the war, economy, technology, weaponry, organization, logistics, supreme command, battle command, morale, everything.

I'm not taking anything away from the Germans.

They fought, I mean,

More people got killed in 1944 than any year of the war.

And that's pretty amazing.

And for all of what I just said,

from the moment the Americans set foot on Normandy until they got to the Elbe River and they had the armistice of the surrender of Nazi Germany, the Germans killed 1.5 Americans for every one they lost.

And in the Soviet Union, which was a disaster for Germany, where they lost over 3 million people, every German soldier killed somewhere between five and six Soviet soldiers.

That's the thing to remember as we'll get to it in the end that

don't cry for me, Argentina, when you hear all these crocodile tears about, oh, they bombed Dresden or they bombed Hiroshima.

The most lethal army in World War II was the Japanese.

For every Japanese soldier, lost, they killed far more civilians and enemy soldiers than any other army in the world.

It was incredible, one to nine.

I mean, they lost about 3 million

soldiers and civilians.

They killed over 20 million people.

And the Germans killed over 20 million people.

And, you know, we lost 450,000 dead, and we probably killed a million and a half.

And so when I get really angry, when I hear all this around Hiroshima and Nagasaki and Dresden and Hamburg, oh, you guys were war criminals, or you did this.

What were they supposed to do?

What were they supposed to do with an enemy that was killing about, if you could do the math, they were killing about 20,000 Asians a day from 1944 on?

The Japanese army was in China and the Pacific, and the Germans were not much far behind.

How do you stop that?

You play by the Marcus and Queensbury rules, where they're putting people in human smoke at Auschwitz, or the Japanese are just murdering people all over China.

And so I don't have any sympathy for what we had to do in World War II to stop the slaughter.

If they don't, if they had not used the bomb, and we'll talk about that next week.

You can imagine what it would have been like with Curtis Somay with 5,000 B-29s at his disposal, another 5,000 B-17s and 24s from the European theater that was over, and not flying from the Marianas exclusively, but from Okinawa, 375 miles away, not you know

3,000 miles away.

Yeah, it would have been really devastating on the Japanese island.

Well, Victor, we need to 1600 miles away.

Yeah,

we need to go to a break and then we'll come back and talk a little bit about agriculture once again.

So stay with us and we'll be back.

Welcome back.

Victor's podcast is produced by

John Solomon's Just the News, and we highly recommend his news site.

He's an investigative reporter who does a great job with all the news coming out of

DC and especially the current investigations of the Biden family.

So, Victor, I know that you wanted to talk about the health of the farmer, and I know that we're all concerned about that, given all the chemicals and such that the

farms and farmers have.

So why don't you go ahead and talk a little bit about

agriculture is, along with mining, are the most dangerous professions in the United States.

And there's a lot of reasons for that.

Farmers have to apply chemicals.

They have to use machinery.

And they're solitary.

You make these decisions and you don't really talk to a lot of people.

So you kind of, I don't know, you get into a mental state when you're on a spray rig and you're spraying,

I don't know, omite for six hours.

And then you say,

did I do two pounds an acre?

Did I have it calibrated?

Or I have a 500-gallon tank?

Is it two pounds?

Was it coming out the right pressure?

Should I have done that?

You know what I mean?

You'd start double-guessing.

And

it's very stressful.

And then not only are you farming, and the sense is, Will these peaches set?

How many degrees over 55 was it at bloom?

Did the bees get out and work for the almonds?

Should I pick in August and get less sweet grapes, but get them in before the rains?

Or wait, wait, wait, and get a heavy, heavy raisin and then get more money, but take a risk.

You have to make those decisions.

And then you're putting on an enormous amount of chemical.

Not so much now, but it came right out of the German pharmaceutical industries.

And we know what Zygon B was.

And that was an organophosphate, organochloride poison.

And

when everybody said, why did you use that stuff?

I said, because it works.

When you go out and look at an orchard and you see a particular new strain of leaf hopper, and at 8 o'clock in the morning, there's kind of some spots on the leaves.

And by 8 o'clock the next day, there's no leaves, then you would like to stop that.

And releasing a bunch of predator mites mites won't stop it.

So people wanted that.

But then they get into

a habit that the more chemicals and pesticides you put on, the more resistant the insect becomes.

Kind of like antibiotics, then you've got to use more powerful.

And I think you reached that peak around 1970 where you couldn't continue that way.

And that really started the organic movement.

And

so I don't really, when I look back at

farming, I don't know whether it was healthy.

All the people in my family who died young, and very few, my grandparents

to a long age, they didn't work on the farm.

They worked in stressful jobs in town and subsidized the farm.

But the people who didn't do anything else but farm, like my grandparents,

my paternal grandfather lived to 80, which was a miracle because he had had mustard gas and phosphine bass eat out his entire stomach.

And he had really bad lungs.

And he lived to be 80 until he had some of the damage in his mouth from gas, World War I,

gave him tumors finally.

But he lived to be 81.

And my grandfather lived to be 86, and my grandmother lived to be 93.

But the people who grew up on the farm and worked off, they all died young.

And I can't figure it out today.

My mother died in 1966 66 of a brain tumor right in the peak of her.

Her sister was a professor at a junior college, Stanford master's and bachelor's.

She died at 49 of breast cancer.

My other aunt, who was crippled with polio, died at 60 from kidney cancer.

My daughter died at 27 from leukemia.

My sister-in-law died at 48 from leukemia.

Her sister died from leukemia.

And I don't know if it was hereditary or genetic or it was growing up not during the early age of my grandparents who were very young, but in those days they used, I guess you'd call them organic poisons.

You know what I mean?

They used arsenic and they used nicotine, but not

these genetic changing chemicals like Paraquat or Roundup or...

omide or diazanon, that kind of stuff.

And so

is it a healthy lifestyle with all the stress and the chemicals and the dangers about mechanical stuff?

I don't know.

It seemed to me that that made it very, very dangerous on the one hand.

And

I can tell you that, you know, it's,

I can tell you that I had a tractor that the hydraulics were going out on a tandem disc.

And

I went back to the tandem disc.

I thought, wow, it's leaking.

And I raised the disc up and I was looking at the bottom of the hose and suddenly the whole gasket blew out and a 1700-pound disc went right down and chopped off the front two inches of my boot, one millimeter from my toes.

Just chopped them off like a slicer.

I mean, the whole book, the boot, the sole, everything.

And I had that happen all the time.

My brother got his finger cut off.

And, you know, my dad, when he was younger, fell on a hay rake and was impaled and had to have half his liver.

That was the whole thing.

You heard all of these stories.

But on the other hand, you got up every morning and your head wasn't cluttered with how do I look?

And I know a lot of readers are going to say, it's, I have a stressful job, Victor.

I'm an attorney.

I have a stress.

And you're right.

You do.

And what I mean by you guys are that are not farming or not

timbermen or miners is you have to be presentable.

You have to commute on that whole, you have to be in an office with all these psychodrama and it's, it's stressful.

But when you're out in the farming, on the other hand, I didn't care what I looked like.

I can remember for nine months, I didn't even go to Fresno.

I didn't go to a city.

And I looked at pictures and I had hair down on my shoulder.

I didn't even know it.

I would just get up every day.

I tried to be very clean, but I didn't shave for seven or eight days at a time.

I had long hair.

I didn't care.

I had old ratty clothes.

The only thing I got shocked is after five years, I went up to get a job.

I thought it was normal.

Everybody looked like that.

And I went up to Cal State Fresno in a pickup.

And I think I told you, I went in to look at that.

And the first thing, the German secretary said,

you have

brought mud into my carpet.

And I had boots that I had been irrigating.

I said, I'm sorry.

I thought, wow, that's weird.

And then the professor said, what are you doing here?

I said, I'm interviewing for this job that was supposed to.

Well, you have to have a college degree.

I said, I do.

Well, we don't hire BAs.

I said, I do.

I have an advanced degree.

He said, we don't hire MAs.

If you're going to teach Latin, you have to have a PhD.

I said, I do.

Well, it can't be from just anywhere.

And

then I went out to the parking lot and I had a

campus police saying, is this your truck?

You've got a loaded gun in here, it looks like.

That's a felony or whatever he claimed it was on a CSU campus.

But everybody carried, you know, for coyotes or stuff.

So it was a great lifestyle.

You had no stress in that sense.

You had to make a living.

But then I remember I got my first check and it came and it was like,

wow.

I did the teaching.

They gave me the check.

And then the next check and I.

I said to my kids and stuff, I said, wow.

No matter what I do, I get a check

within limits, right?

Within limits.

Yes, yes.

But I said, you know, when I have a Santa Rosa orchard, I do everything right and it hails.

Or I've got

a beautiful Thompson vineyard with a nice

crop on it and it comes in and freezes and destroys it for the whole year.

I don't get a check.

This place gives you a check.

And I said to my, I had a really good friend, Gus Garagas.

I wrote about him in Fields Dreams, bus barzagas.

I said, I get a check, Gus, Chuck, I get a check.

He said, that's what you did.

Yes, you did.

You plugged into the system.

And it's a great thing to get plugged into the system.

But remember,

that check, you're going to have to be, you're going to have to drive all the way up to Fresno and you're going to have to get some clothes and you're going to have to do this and you're going to have to look, comb your hair, and you're going to have to watch your language and you just when you have to go you can't just go behind a bush and urinate on the campus you know

so

and so that was that's that was stressful and that's why i have a lot of empathy for people who can do that and farming was just like a refuge i mean jefferson said

The nice thing about a farm is it's a sanctuary to hide failure, if you have one.

And he was very bitter his rivalry with Adams.

He could always go back to Montecito.

But after I got a PhD and there were no jobs, it was kind of bitter to be 25 with a PhD and have your thesis coming out as a book and you were completely unemployable.

I reached a Nadir when I went to, I won't mention the little town, but there is a tiny, tiny little town.

And it has a tiny, tiny school.

And I went in there.

I was so broke after the 1983 disaster where the price collapsed I said I would like to be a part-time teacher of eighth grade and he said well let me see your credentials so I had this all rumpled resume I'd typed years ago and I handed him he goes wait a minute you have a PhD from Stanford in classical language they said why would in the hell would we want that

And I said, are you serious?

I can't get the job.

He said, no, we don't want you.

Why would you want that?

So I came home and my mom was there and she goes, well, how'd it go?

I said, I just reached the low point of my entire life.

I was turned down by an eighth grade rural school that has no standards.

And they said I didn't qualify.

Of course, in that generation that went through the Depression and World War II and self-improvement, she had come from a little farm and got.

BA from UOP, another BA from Stanford, JD from Stanford, and da da da da.

It was, well, that's okay.

Anything doesn't kill you, makes you stronger.

So you just hit that, keep going, keep going.

There'll be an opening and just squeeze through it.

That's their attitude.

That's how they won the war, I guess.

Yeah, on to the next thing.

Yes, onward and over.

And then I got another class.

I got one class and then I got two classes.

And then the next year I got three.

And then I got a permanent lectureship.

And then I got an assistant professor.

And my dad, see, there you go.

And then Chuck would come by and he'd be all dirty.

And I would come bold in in school and I'd look somewhat presentable.

It said, you plugged into the system

and you've got a check.

And rain or shine, every single rain or shine, nor labor, nor pesticide, nothing, or some little stupid three-spotted mite.

They can't take that check away from me.

And that's why I went.

And, you know, the more that I did that, because I tried to do both.

for another 10 years.

That was crazy.

But the more I did that, the more respect I got for farmers.

I mean, my God, those guys are the the salt of the earth.

How they do it, I don't know.

And to this day, when I see a farmer, I have nothing but empathy because nothing is guaranteed.

And they have the banks against them.

They have the weather against them.

They have the labor against them.

They have the chemical industry.

They have everything against them.

They have their attitude for them, though.

It is what it is, Victor.

It is what it is.

That's what my winner says.

Every time he starts to tell me something's bad,

he's a wonderful guy.

Family was from Basque.

Victor, it is what it is.

It is what it is.

Or my other neighbor, he would say, or that's all there is to it.

That's all there is to it.

I said, all there is to what?

Well, that's all there is to it.

And then exactly.

Yeah.

And so it was, they have a tragic view of the world.

That's why I really started, when I started farming, I started devouring, or that's not the right metaphor, but but watching every John Ford, John Wayne movie I could and watching every tragic western, Shane, Magnificent Seven, Wild Bunch, Ride the High Country.

I read every play of Sophocles in Greek, again, all seven, Ajax, Philoctetes, Antigone, you name it.

I read it.

And because I could see these guys all around me were tragic figures.

They were really going to do everything perfect and they were going to lose.

But they wanted to have a particular code in losing.

That's right.

And they were going to play it out all the way to the end, regardless.

That's a great line in the Ride the Hunt Country.

Let's play it out to the end.

And I had a great neighbor.

I can even mention his name, Casey Jones.

Believe it or not, Casey Jones.

I've never seen a farmer that was so skilled in my life.

I've never seen a guy who was such a mechanic.

I've never seen a person who worked so hard.

I mean, I would get up at five and work to eight, but he would get up at five and I'd hear him sulfuring at one in the morning.

Couldn't sleep.

The machine was so loud.

And

by any rule, he was such a wonderful farmer.

He should be, he should have, but every time

all of us, you know, but especially him, I mean, I could see sometimes I didn't deserve to make a profit because I wasn't as good a farmer, but he did.

And yet nobody made a profit.

And he had to go work as a, you know, at a high school as a maintenance man, but of course he went in as a maintenance man and ended up running things because he was a mechanical genius.

But what I'm getting at, all these talented people that just worked like crazy, and they never really got rich, and they didn't really care to get rich, but they had a particular code.

And I really like that about them.

Yeah.

I like that code they had.

We've gotten far from the health health of the farmer to his attitude, which is great though.

Nice digression.

Thank you so much.

So, all of you.

Yes, we're at the end of the show.

All of you, if you meet a farmer, tip your hat to him.

We need them.

They're different than the rest of us.

Yeah.

All right.

Well, thank you very much.

And thanks to our audience.

Thank you, everybody, for listening.

See you next time.

This is Victor Davis Hanson and Sammy Wink, and we're signing off.